Saturday, December 8, 2012

Certainly history has shown that the best way to repeat is to retain every veteran coming off a peak season for millions of dollars.

Well, yeah. I was nice to Brian Sabean last week; now, here he goes, with Pagan and Scutaro, repeating his mistake from two years ago (Aubrey Huff, Freddy Sanchez).

Hank Schulman said something about the hitters at every position being locked up through 2014, but, no, the odds of Pence, Pagan, Blanco, and Scutaro all making it that long as regulars are about zilch.

For the most part, however, it's only money. I mean, there's no way that Pagan is going to play 140+ games a year for the Giants for the four years of his contract...but they've moved on before, even when they had to eat salary to do so. The problem is that there's every possibility that one of them will play regularly through a collapse year (just as Huff did last year)...well, anyway, it's two weak contracts.

As I've said before: I really do think the 1990s Braves were as good as they were primarily because they were the very rare winning team willing to dump popular stars. It's too bad Sabean wasn't paying attention.

2 comments:

" I really do think the 1990s Braves were as good as they were primarily because they were the very rare winning team willing to dump popular stars."

1) It didn't always work out for the Braves. Trading Justice and Grissom for Lofton for instance. Or offering Maddux arbitration then being forced to trade Millwood when Greg accepted. Or in the 2000s, trading Laroche and installing Scott Thormon at 1st.2) To the extent it did work, it was because the Braves had an amazing amount of minor league talent ready to replace those older players as a result of having been truly terrible in the late '80s. Probably not the case for your Giants.

Ugh. Pagan just had the best year of his career, and he wasn't even as good as Aaron Rowand was in 2007, when the Giants signed Rowand to that disastrous contract. And Rowand was a year younger.

You didn't mention the Affeldt signing. I like Affedlt a lot, but I don't get throwing $18 million at a middle bullpen guy. As Sabean well knows, you can find Affeldt types off the scrap heap in July if you need bullpen help. And if Affeldt has a bad year (middle bullpen guys in their 30s often have bad years), he may even end up on that scrap heap. It's a waste.